Odd WinXP slowdown issue

I am running an AMD 3.2ghz processor with a gig of RAM and an nVidia 7800 GS card on WinXP Home.

Every so often SL seems to "freeze". The window title shows "Not Responding)", and the cursor dissappears. No action takes place in screen at all. If I click my mouse a couple of times, I get an hourglass for about 30 seconds, then everything goes back to normal.

Sometimes it will happen several times a night, sometimes only once or twice. Any ideas what might be causing this?

Something connecting, calling home in the background?
Do you have Norton, NIS, a free ram program etc?

Nope, no Norton, no silly free ram proggies, none of that stuff. I disable as many utilities as I can to run SL, save for the Zone Alarm firewall. I also tend to run at the lowest graphics level until I get somewhere I'm going to be sitting for a while.

Next time this happens, check your HDD access light.

Is it solid on, or almost solid on?

Thinking the swapfile, maybe?

I'll check that when I get on this evening and let you know what I see.

This is the Nvidia Freeze Issue I believe. i've been having it too, as have many others. It could be your video drivers are restarting but not giving a notification. Or it could be something completely different. In any event, here is the JIRA:

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-6733

Hmm, I dont think so. My graphics don't change at all, the action simply stops. Plus the SL window reports as "not responding" for those few moments. I'm tempted to think it's a system problem somehow, not the video card or driver ... but I'm prepared to eat my words at the drop of a hat.

That's my theory.

Last week I had to use SL on XP with 1GB RAM, and I had that issue a few times.

Sure enough, the HDD light is ablaze while this happens. I brought up the performance monitor and watched my swapfile usage slowly grow, as I traveled around, to 1GB - and that's when things start getting bizarre for my system.

Curiously, using the remote camera with Disable Camera Constraints checked brings it on even faster, especially if I move the camera a long distance from my ava.

Even more curious - when I switch the performance monitor to the foreground, the pause in SL instantly stops.

My swapfile is set at 1500 megs, min and max. My HD is partitioned into two drives: the swapfile on one, Windows and SL on the other.

Ensure that there is only one swap file (it should be on the Windows partition, but if it's not, no big deal, it just means you don't get crash dumps). if you have a swap file on each partition, it hurts performance (if you have two hard disks, and have a swap file on each, it improves performance, so some people think it applies to partitions too, which is just the opposite).

Also close as much as you can while running SL.

As for using remote cam..makes sense that it'd bring this on sooner. You're moving around more with remote cam, meaning you're loading more textures, thus bloating up SL.

Let's see if it helps .. thanks for the assistance.

That sounds exactly like the NVidia freeze issue which, incidentally, isn't limited to SL. It also manifests itself in different ways. With some games it turns the screen white while you're getting the Not Responding message. With others it goes black. Sometimes, it will just freeze without changing colour at all. Then whoop, 10-30 secs later, everything continues as normal.

I'm not certain. Only the SL application grinds to a halt - I can access the rest of my system normally and it appears normally as well. If it were a case of the driver or the hardware, I'd be surprised if it *didn't* occur across the board - but as I noted, I can switch to the performance monitor while it occurs, and when I do, the freeze stops. This doesn't sound like an issue with the video card itself, and doubtful that it's the driver.

I'm going to have to do further investigation on this in any case.

Same here.



Not necessarily. If the driver bug is limited to DirectX or OpenGL acceleration, it may well only affect any running 3D applications.

The eventual system hang (in those cases where it happens) is probably down to allocated memory not being released if/when the application crashes.

Good luck anyway.

I can't remember where XP's problem logs are (Control Panel > Problem Reports and Solutions > View Problem History on Vista), but I expect they'd confirm if the drivers are to blame (the driver reinit() will be evident).

I've experienced the same symptoms about once per hour with the RC viewer of about a week ago. My system is a generic but pretty powerful vanilla XP machine, the graphics is nVidia.

To the best of my ability to diagnose, SL is madly page faulting during this period and then resumes as if nothing happened. The system unfreezes in about 30seconds regardless of whether I look at the diagnostic tools or not. I suggest that perhaps the time involved in launching the performance monitor may be enough for SL to finish its swap frenzy; you might want to try doing nothing to see if it clears itself.

I have read other reports of the same phenomenon here; unfortunately, there is very little data available to diagnose further.

Oh, no no, the monitor is already running; I'm just alt-tabbing to put it in the foreground.

But what Walker said about the glitch having to do with DirectX or OpenGL makes sense. That would most likely limit the nonsense to the SL viewer.

DirectX and OpenGL wouldn't exactly be the first places I'd look. It's always possible, but it doesn't seem very likely. Nor would a driver crash and restart (since SL comes back).

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896642.aspx

Running that in the background, then looking at it when you start seeing this issue, could help you pinpoint exactly what's going on. That program logs disk activity.